‘Skin to win,’ as they say at spring break – when they aren’t calling for an appearance by the former President. The Octane render is interesting – very nice indeed. I have to say though to my personal view, it looks just a wee bit like a doll, and I don’t see quite the depth and life that I have seen in some of the best Poser renders. I don’t think that’s necessarily a limitation of Octane. Poser’s users and developers have spent years bringing it to the level it is now in terms of realistic skin. It’s not realistic (no pun intended) to expect the same level of achievement in a relatively new render engine (in conjunction with Poser). Even if the render engine already has a good base solution like Max’s FastSkin, someone has to either learn an entirely different way to do things or hope for a reasonable start via an exporter of some sort and then tweak from there. Much as I love Vue, without SkinVue, it would be a much less attractive option for Poser figures. If realism is your thing, then just about any of the established renderers has a large selection of architectural and other shaders available. Really high quality human skin solutions seem to be more of a roll your own proposition – at least from what I’ve seen.

I’m sure it may be less of an issue for some doing animations, where you have lots of other things going on and may not focus on a character for lengthy shots. I don’t animate but I can see where in many cases, speed would be a powerful factor. Maybe, given that speed seems to be the main reason for considering GPU to begin with, the point is moot. I’m sure that as these hardware rendering solutions mature, and more of the really talented Poser folks like Face_Off work on the connection, we’ll see better and better results. To be fair, I think its already at least 90% of the way there. I should hasten to add that the render shown would be more than good enough for 98% of what I would be interested in doing. It only falls just shy (IMO) of the tippy top, what’s yer index of confabulation level, that late model Poser can be pushed to.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken